If your company were a living creature, Sales and Marketing would be two specialized vital organs that need to work together to sustain and grow your business. Lack of communication or coordination in these essential areas can hinder your company’s growth or even cause it to wither. To work effectively they need an integrated and streamlined process to keep your company healthy.

Closed Loop Marketing Architecture™

At Revenue Architects, we’ve developed a Closed Loop Marketing Architecture™ to provide a blueprint for revenue marketing and aligning marketing and sales. It’s a continuous process that delivers tailored omni-channel experiences that engage customers and drive conversions. By ‘closing the loop’, sales and marketing align around the end-to-end customer lifecycle and campaigns are measured for total revenue impact.

This blueprint enables businesses to refine their marketing strategies based on data that is managed and analyzed to provide much needed insights into your prospects and the customer lifecycle. Many businesses perform these same tasks internally with various teams, or pay for multiple services — like e-blast platforms, CRMs, lead tracking, etc. — but often these methods, which don’t ‘close the loop’, waste valuable resources and lead to incomplete or ineffective results.

Closing the Loop with Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software has quickly become an essential tool to create this nexus between sales and marketing. By automating repetitive tasks — i.e., email campaigns, social media, data management, analysis, etc. — you can nurture prospects with highly personalized communication and content that aid conversion.

And, with better data management, you can analyze and reshape your marketing strategies to build on successful campaigns and eliminate what isn’t working. Marketing automation makes your processes quicker and simpler, saving your business time and money while achieving better results. Yes, there is a learning curve, but some tools excel at making the process easy.

Enter SharpSpring Marketing Automation

SharpSpring is one such marketing automation tool, and it’s great for beginner/intermediate-level marketing or sales managers. Add a bit of javascript to a site, replace or map in your existing forms, and immediately start tracking visitors. Use email marketing templates to create relevant content for various types of customer engagement. Then, create simple or complex workflows and automation tasks to deliver tailored content to the right prospect at the right time in the customer lifecycle. Grow your email list, send regularly, track the clicks and the activity of visitors on the site, and then target drip campaigns at visitors based on these site activities.

Get Real-Time Analytics, Lead Nurturing and Tracking

SharpSpring’s analytics dashboard gives helpful stats for you to review daily to see what kind of leads you’re getting in through your marketing channels. Beyond the metrics such as bounce rate, open rate, and unsubscribes, SharpSpring’s campaign ROI tracking, automated lead nurturing and CRM enable you to gain a better understanding of your customers and the business cycle.

Automated marketing workflows and lead scoring based on your specific criteria help you to qualify and filter leads to prioritize responses. You can use clickthrough or call tracking on PPC campaigns to connect leads to their website activity as well as capture leads who do not click the ad.

Create a 360 Degree Picture of Your Client Engagements

From prospecting to on-boarding to campaign engagement, SharpSpring’s suite of services help you develop an intelligent business dossier on prospects and current clients which allows you to engage them at critical points. Look at the “Life of a Lead” timeline on any given contact to see when he or she has filled out forms, opened emails, visited your website, etc. for an insightful snapshot of their engagement.

Identify and Track Anonymous Web Visitors

The vast majority of web visitors remain anonymous because they don’t fill out forms. SharpSpring’s VisitorID identifies the companies visiting your site using reverse IP lookup, and provides you contact info, including names, emails and phone numbers. This feature alone can double or even triple the number of leads that can be gleaned from your existing website traffic. If you have a specific product, promotion or service you are offering, you can specify important pages to watch and VisitorID recognizes when someone views an important page, checks out where they came from and identifies which search terms led to your site.

Experience, Optimize, Launch

Integrated campaign development and execution is often very challenging when sales and marketing teams are not in alignment, but with our Closed Loop Marketing Architecture™ blueprint, coupled with marketing automation, a unique and comprehensive solution is provided. Using a marketing automation tool such as SharpSpring, you can harvest the crucial data needed for creating targeted campaigns, converting customers, and analyzing ROI — essentially closing the marketing loop while increasing productivity.

Technology is evolving and businesses continually adapt to survive and thrive. Marketing automation may just be the shot in the arm your company needs to stay robust and resilient.